Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 by Various

V >> Various >> Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859

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[Footnote A: A fact.]

"The Doctor has made up his mind that it's his duty," said Mrs. Scudder.
"I'm afraid it will make him very unpopular; but I, for one, shall stand
by him."

"Oh, certainly, Miss Scudder, you are doing just right exactly. Well,
there's one comfort, he'll have a great crowd to hear him preach;
'cause, as I was going round through the entries last night, I heard 'em
talking about it,--and Colonel Burr said he should be there, and so did
the General, and so did Mr. What's-his-name there, that Senator from
Philadelphia. I tell you, you'll have a full house."

It was to be confessed that Mrs. Scudder's heart rather sunk than
otherwise at this announcement; and those who have felt what it is to
stand almost alone in the right, in the face of all the first families
of their acquaintance, may perhaps find some compassion for her,--since,
after all, truth is invisible, but "first families" are very evident.
First families are often very agreeable, undeniably respectable,
fearfully virtuous, and it takes great faith to resist an evil principle
which incarnates itself in the suavities of their breeding and
amiability; and therefore it was that Mrs. Scudder felt her heart heavy
within her, and could with a very good grace have joined in the Doctor's
Saturday fast.

As for the Doctor, he sat the while tranquil in his study, with his
great Bible and his Concordance open before him, culling, with that
patient assiduity for which he was remarkable, all the terrible texts
which that very unceremonious and old-fashioned book rains down so
unsparingly on the sin of oppressing the weak.

First families, whether in Newport or elsewhere, were as invisible to
him as they were to Moses during the forty days that he spent with God
on the mount; he was merely thinking of his message,--thinking only how
he should shape it, so as not to leave one word of it unsaid,--not even
imagining in the least what the result of it was to be. He was but a
voice, but an instrument,--the passive instrument through which an
almighty will was to reveal itself; and the sublime fatalism of his
faith made him as dead to all human considerations as if he had been a
portion of the immutable laws of Nature herself.

So, the next morning, although all his friends trembled for him when he
rose in the pulpit, he never thought of trembling for himself; he had
come in the covered way of silence from the secret place of the Most
High, and felt himself still abiding under the shadow of the Almighty.
It was alike to him, whether the house was full or empty,--whoever were
decreed to hear the message would be there; whether they would hear or
forbear was already settled in the counsels of a mightier will than
his,--he had the simple duty of utterance.

The ruinous old meeting-house was never so radiant with station and
gentility as on that morning. A June sun shone brightly; the sea
sparkled with a thousand little eyes; the birds sang all along the
way; and all the notables turned out to hear the Doctor. Mrs. Scudder
received into her pew, with dignified politeness, Colonel Burr and
Colonel and Madame de Frontignac. General Wilcox and his portly dame,
Major Seaforth, and we know not what of Vernons and De Wolfs, and other
grand old names, were represented there; stiff silks rustled, Chinese
fans fluttered, and the last court fashions stood revealed in bonnets.

Everybody was looking fresh and amiable,--a charming and respectable set
of sinners, come to hear what the Doctor would find to tell them about
their transgressions.

Mrs. Scudder was calculating consequences; and, shutting her eyes on the
too evident world about her, prayed that the Lord would overrule all for
good. The Doctor prayed that he might have grace to speak the truth,
and the whole truth. We have yet on record, in his published works, the
great argument of that day, through which he moved with that calm appeal
to the reason which made his results always so weighty.

"If these things be true," he said, after a condensed statement of the
facts of the case, "then the following terrible consequences, which may
well make all shudder and tremble who realize them, force themselves
upon us, namely: that all who have had any hand in this iniquitous
business, whether directly or indirectly, or have used their influence
to promote it, or have consented to it, or even connived at it, or have
not opposed it by all proper exertions of which they are capable,--all
these are, in a greater or less degree, chargeable with the injuries and
miseries which millions have suffered and are suffering, and are guilty
of the blood of millions who have lost their lives by this traffic in
the human species. Not only the merchants who have been engaged in this
trade, and the captains who have been tempted by the love of money to
engage in this cruel work, and the slave-holders of every description,
are guilty of shedding rivers of blood, but all the legislatures who
have authorized, encouraged, or even neglected to suppress it to the
utmost of their power, and all the individuals in private stations who
have in any way aided in this business, consented to it, or have not
opposed it to the utmost of their ability, have a share in this guilt.

"This trade in the human species has been the first wheel of commerce in
Newport, on which every other movement in business has chiefly depended;
this town has been built up, and flourished in times past, at the
expense of the blood, the liberty, and the happiness of the poor
Africans; and the inhabitants have lived on this, and by it have gotten
most of their wealth and riches. If a bitter woe is pronounced on him
'that buildeth his house by unrighteousness and his chambers by wrong,'
Jer. xxii. 13,--to him 'that buildeth a town with blood, and stablisheth
a city by iniquity,' Hab. ii. 12,--to 'the bloody city,' Ezek. xxiv.
6,--what a heavy, dreadful woe hangs over the heads of all those
whose hands are defiled by the blood of the Africans, especially the
inhabitants of this State and this town, who have had a distinguished
share in this unrighteous and bloody commerce!"

He went over the recent history of the country, expatiated on the
national declaration so lately made, that all men are born equally free
and independent and have natural and inalienable rights to liberty, and
asked with what face a nation declaring such things could continue to
hold thousands of their fellowmen in abject slavery. He pointed out
signs of national disaster which foreboded the wrath of Heaven,--the
increase of public and private debts, the spirit of murmuring and
jealousy of rulers among the people, divisions and contentions and
bitter party alienations, the jealous irritation of England constantly
endeavoring to hamper our trade, the Indians making war on the
frontiers, the Algerines taking captive our ships and making slaves
of our citizens,--all evident tokens of the displeasure and impending
judgment of an offended Justice.

The sermon rolled over the heads of the gay audience, deep and dark as a
thunder-cloud, which in a few moments changes a summer sky into heaviest
gloom. Gradually an expression of intense interest and deep concern
spread over the listeners; it was the magnetism of a strong mind, which
held them for a time under the shadow of his own awful sense of God's
almighty justice.

It is said that a little child once described his appearance in the
pulpit by saying, "I saw God there, and I was afraid."

Something of the same effect was produced on his audience now; and it
was not till after sermon, prayer, and benediction were all over, that
the respectables of Newport began gradually to unstiffen themselves
from the spell, and to look into each other's eyes for comfort, and to
reassure themselves that after all they were the first families, and
going on the way the world had always gone, and that the Doctor, of
course, was a radical and a fanatic.

When the audience streamed out, crowding the broad aisle, Mary descended
from the singers, and stood with her psalm-book in hand, waiting at the
door to be joined by her mother and the Doctor. She overheard many
hard words from people who, an evening or two before, had smiled so
graciously upon them. It was therefore with no little determination of
manner that she advanced and took the Doctor's arm, as if anxious to
associate herself with his well-earned unpopularity,--and just at
this moment she caught the eye and smile of Colonel Burr, as he bowed
gracefully, yet not without a suggestion of something sarcastic in his
eye.

[To be continued.]

THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE.

WHAT HE SAID, WHAT HE HEARD, AND WHAT HE SAW.

You don't look so dreadful poor in the face as you did a while back.
Bloated some, I expect.

This was the cheerful and encouraging remark with which the Poor
Relation greeted the divinity-student one morning.

Of course every good man considers it a great sacrifice on his part to
continue living in this transitory, unsatisfactory, and particularly
unpleasant world. This is so much a matter of course, that I was
surprised to see the divinity-student change color. He took a look at a
small and uncertain-minded glass which hung slanting forward over the
chapped sideboard. The image it returned to him had the color of a very
young pea somewhat over-boiled. The scenery of a long tragic drama
flashed through his mind as the lightning-express-train _whishes_ by a
station: the gradual dismantling process of disease; friends looking on,
sympathetic, but secretly chuckling over their own stomachs of iron and
lungs of caoutchouc; nurses attentive, but calculating their crop, and
thinking how soon it will be ripe, so that they can go to your neighbor,
who is good for a year or so longer; doctors assiduous, but giving
themselves a mental shake, as they go out of your door, that throws
off your particular grief as a duck sheds a rain-drop from his oily
feathers; undertakers solemn, but happy; then the great subsoil
cultivator, who plants, but never looks for fruit in his garden; then
the stone-cutter, who finds the lie that has been waiting for you on a
slab ever since the birds or beasts made their tracks on the new red
sandstone; then the grass and the dandelions and the buttercups,--Earth
saying to the mortal body, with her sweet symbolism, "You have scarred
my bosom, but you are forgiven"; then a glimpse of the soul as a
floating consciousness without very definite form or place, but dimly
conceived of as an upright column of vapor or mist several times larger
than life-size, so far as it could be said to have any size at all,
wandering about and living a thin and half-awake life for want of good
old-fashioned solid _matter_ to come down upon with foot and fist,--in
fact, having neither foot nor fist, nor conveniences for taking the
sitting posture.

And yet the divinity-student was a good Christian, and those heathen
images which remind one of the childlike fancies of the dying Adrian
were only the efforts of his imagination to give shape to the formless
and position to the placeless. Neither did his thoughts spread
themselves out and link themselves as I have displayed them. They came
confusedly into his mind like a heap of broken mosaics,--sometimes a
part of the picture complete in itself, sometimes connected fragments,
and sometimes only single severed stones.

They did not diffuse a light of celestial joy over his countenance. On
the contrary, the Poor Relation's remark turned him pale, as I have
said; and when the terrible wrinkled and jaundiced looking-glass turned
him green in addition, and he saw himself in it, it seemed to him as
if it were all settled, and his book of life were to be shut not yet
half-read, and go back to the dust of the under-ground archives. He
coughed a mild short cough, as if to point the direction in which his
downward path was tending. It was an honest little cough enough, so far
as appearances went. But coughs are ungrateful things. You find one out
in the cold, take it up and nurse it and make everything of it, dress it
up warm, give it all sorts of balsams and other food it likes, and carry
it round in your bosom as if it were a miniature lapdog. And by-and-by
its little bark grows sharp and savage, and--confound the thing!--you
find it is a wolf's whelp that you have got there, and he is gnawing in
the breast where he has been nestling so long.--The Poor Relation said
that somebody's surrup was good for folks that were gettin' into a
bad way. The landlady had heard of desperate cases cured by
cherry-pictorial.

Whiskey's the fellah,--said the young man John.--Make it into punch,
cold at dinner-time 'n' hot at bed-time. I'll come up 'n' show you how
to mix it. Haven't any of you seen the wonderful fat man exhibitin' down
in Hanover Street?

Master Benjamin Franklin rushed into the dialogue with a breezy
exclamation, that he had seen a great picter outside of the place where
the fat man was exhibitin'. Tried to get in at half-price, but the man
at the door looked at his teeth and said he was more'n ten year old.

It isn't two years,--said the young man John,--since that fat fellah
was exhibitin' here as the Livin' Skeleton. Whiskey--that's what did
it,--real Burbon's the stuff. Hot water, sugar, 'n' jest a little
shavin' of lemon-skin in it,--_skin_, mind you, none o' your juice; take
it off thin,--shape of one of them flat curls the factory-girls wear on
the sides of their foreheads.

But I am a teetotaller,--said the divinity-student, in a subdued
tone;--not noticing the enormous length of the bow-string the young
fellow had just drawn.

He took up his hat and went out.

I think you have worried that young man more than you meant,--I said.--I
don't believe he will jump off of one of the bridges, for he has too
much principle; but I mean to follow him and see where he goes, for he
looks as if his mind were made up to something.

I followed him at a reasonable distance. He walked doggedly along,
looking neither to the right nor the left, turned into State Street, and
made for a well-known Life-Insurance Office. Luckily, the doctor was
there and overhauled him on the spot. There was nothing the matter with
him, he said, and he could have his life insured as a sound one. He came
out in good spirits, and told me this soon after.

This led me to make some remarks the next morning on the manners of
well-bred and ill-bred people.

I began,--The whole essence of true gentle-breeding (one does not
like to say gentility) lies in the wish and the art to be agreeable.
Good-breeding is _surface-Christianity_. Every look, movement, tone,
expression, subject of discourse, that may give pain to another is
habitually excluded from conversational intercourse. This is the reason
why rich people are apt to be so much more agreeable than others.

--I thought you were a great champion of equality,--said the discreet
and severe lady who had accompanied our young friend, the Latin Tutor's
daughter.

I go politically for _e_quality,--I said,--and socially for _the_
quality.

Who are the "quality,"--said the Model, etc.,--in a community like ours?

I confess I find this question a little difficult to answer,--I
said.--Nothing is better known than the distinction of social ranks
which exists in every community, and nothing is harder to define. The
great gentlemen and ladies of a place are its real lords and masters and
mistresses; they are the _quality_, whether in a monarchy or a republic;
mayors and governors and generals and senators and ex-presidents are
nothing to them. How well we know this, and how seldom it finds a
distinct expression! Now I tell you truly, I believe in man as man, and
I disbelieve in all distinctions except such as follow the natural lines
of cleavage in a society which has crystallized according to its own
true laws. But the essence of equality is to be able to say the truth;
and there is nothing more curious than these truths relating to the
stratification of society.

Of all the facts in this world that do not take hold of immortality,
there is not one so intensely real, permanent, and engrossing as this of
social position,--as you see by the circumstance that the core of all
the great social orders the world has seen has been, and is still, for
the most part, a privileged class of gentlemen and ladies arranged in a
regular scale of precedence among themselves, but superior as a body to
all else.

Nothing but an ideal Christian equality, which we have been getting
farther away from since the days of the Primitive Church, can
prevent this subdivision of society into classes from taking place
everywhere,--in the great centres of our republic as much as in
old European monarchies. Only there position is more absolutely
hereditary,--here it is more completely elective.

--Where is the election held? and what are the qualifications? and who
are the electors?--said the Model.

Nobody ever sees when the vote is taken; there never is a formal vote.
The women settle it mostly; and they know wonderfully well what is
presentable, and what can't stand the blaze of the chandeliers and the
critical eye and ear of people trained to know a staring shade in a
ribbon, a false light in a jewel, an ill-bred tone, an angular movement,
everything that betrays a coarse fibre and cheap training. As a general
thing, you do not get elegance short of two or three removes from the
soil, out of which our best blood doubtless comes,--quite as good, no
doubt, as if it came from those old prize-fighters with iron pots on
their heads, to whom some great people are so fond of tracing their
descent through a line of small artisans and petty shopkeepers whose
veins have held base fluid enough to fill the Cloaca Maxima!

Does not money go everywhere?--said the Model.

Almost. And with good reason. For though there are numerous exceptions,
rich people are, as I said, commonly altogether the most agreeable
companions. The influence of a fine house, graceful furniture, good
libraries, well-ordered tables, trim servants, and, above all, a
position so secure that one becomes unconscious of it, gives a harmony
and refinement to the character and manners which we feel, even if
we cannot explain their charm. Yet we can get at the reason of it by
thinking a little.

All these appliances are to shield the sensibility from disagreeable
contacts, and to soothe it by varied natural and artificial influences.
In this way the mind, the taste, the feelings, grow delicate, just as
the hands grow white and soft when saved from toil and incased in soft
gloves. The whole nature becomes subdued into suavity. I confess I like
the quality-ladies better than the common kind even of literary ones.
They haven't read the last book, perhaps, but they attend better to you
when you are talking to them. If they are never learned, they make up
for it in tact and elegance. Besides, I think, on the whole, there is
less self-assertion in diamonds than in dogmas. I don't know where
you will find a sweeter portrait of humility than in Esther, the poor
play-girl of King Ahasuerus; yet Esther put on her royal apparel when
she went before her lord. I have no doubt she was a more gracious and
agreeable person than Deborah, who judged the people and wrote the story
of Sisera. The wisest woman you talk with is ignorant of something that
you know, but an elegant woman never forgets her elegance.

Dowdyism is clearly an expression of imperfect vitality. The highest
fashion is intensely alive,--not alive necessarily to the truest and
best things, but with its blood tingling, as it were, in all its
extremities and to the farthest point of its surface, so that the
feather in its bonnet is as fresh as the crest of a fighting-cock, and
the rosette on its slipper as clean-cut and _pimpant_ (pronounce it
English fashion,--it is a good word) as a dahlia. As a general rule,
that society where flattery is acted is much more agreeable than that
where it is spoken. Don't you see why? Attention and deference don't
require you to make fine speeches expressing your sense of unworthiness
(lies) and returning all the compliments paid you. This is one reason.

--A woman of sense ought to be above flattering any man,--said the
Model.

[_My reflection._ Oh! oh! no wonder you didn't get married. Served you
right.] _My remark._ Surely, Madam,--if you mean by flattery telling
people boldly to their faces that they are this or that, which they are
not. But a woman who does not carry a halo of good feeling and desire
to make everybody contented about with her wherever she goes,--an
atmosphere of grace, mercy, and peace, of at least six feet radius,
which wraps every human being upon whom she voluntarily bestows her
presence, and so flatters him with the comfortable thought that she
is rather glad he is alive than otherwise, isn't worth the trouble of
talking to, _as a woman_; she may do well enough to hold discussions
with.

--I don't think the Model exactly liked this. She said,--a little
spitefully, I thought,--that a sensible man might stand a little praise,
but would of course soon get sick of it, if he were in the habit of
getting much.

Oh, yes,--I replied,--just as men get sick of tobacco. It is notorious
how apt they are to get tired of that vegetable.

--That's so!--said the young fellow John.--I've got tired of my cigars
and burnt 'em all up.

I am heartily glad to hear it,--said the Model.--I wish they were all
disposed of in the same way.

So do I,--said the young fellow John.

Can't you get your friends to unite with you in committing those odious
instruments of debauchery to the flames in which you have consumed your
own?

I wish I could,--said the young fellow John.

It would be a noble sacrifice,--said the Model,--and every American
woman would be grateful to you. Let us burn them all in a heap out in
the yard.

That a'n't my way,--said the young fellow John;--I burn 'em one 't'
time,--little end in my mouth and big end outside.

--I watched for the effect of this sudden change of programme, when it
should reach the calm stillness of the Model's interior apprehension,
as a boy watches for the splash of a stone which he has dropped into a
well. But before it had fairly reached the water, poor Iris, who had
followed the conversation with a certain interest until it turned this
sharp corner, (for she seems rather to fancy the young fellow John,)
laughed out such a clear, loud laugh, that it started us all off, as the
locust-cry of some full-throated soprano drags a multitudinous chorus
after it. It was plain that some dam or other had broken in the soul of
this young girl, and she was squaring up old scores of laughter, out of
which she had been cheated, with a grand flood of merriment that
swept all before it. So we had a great laugh all round, in which the
Model--who, if she had as many virtues as there are spokes to a wheel,
all compacted with a personality as round and complete as its tire, yet
wanted that one little addition of grace, which seems so small, and
is as important as the linchpin in trundling over the rough ways of
life--had not the tact to join. She seemed to be "stuffy" about it, as
the young fellow John said. In fact, I was afraid the joke would have
cost us both our new lady-boarders. It had no effect, however, except,
perhaps, to hasten the departure of the elder of the two, who could, on
the whole, be spared.

--I had meant to make this note of our conversation a text for a few
axioms on the matter of breeding. But it so happened, that, exactly at
this point of my record, a very distinguished philosopher, whom several
of our boarders and myself go to hear, and whom no doubt many of my
readers follow habitually, treated this matter of _manners_. Up to this
point, if I have been so fortunate as to coincide with him in opinion,
and so unfortunate as to try to express what he has more felicitously
said, nobody is to blame; for what has been given thus far was all
written before the lecture was delivered. But what shall I do now? He
told us it was childish to lay down rules for deportment,--but he could
not help laying down a few.

Thus,--_Nothing so vulgar as to be in a hurry._--True, but hard of
application. People with short legs step quickly, because legs are
pendulums, and swing more times in a minute the shorter they are.
Generally a natural rhythm runs through the whole organization: quick
pulse, fast breathing, hasty speech, rapid trains of thought, excitable
temper. _Stillness_ of person and steadiness of features are signal
marks of good-breeding. Vulgar persons can't sit still, or, at least,
they must work their limbs--or features.

_Talking of one's own ails and grievances._--Bad enough, but not so bad
as insulting the person you talk with by remarking on his ill-looks, or
appearing to notice any of his personal peculiarities.

_Apologizing._--A very desperate habit,--one that is rarely cured.
Apology is only egotism wrong side out. Nine times out of ten, the first
thing a man's companion knows of his shortcoming is from his apology. It
is mighty presumptuous on your part to suppose your small failures of so
much consequence that you must make a talk about them.

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